Parchment and Rice Paper
by ShinigamiForever
Summary: In which Draco escapes to China, does a bit of sight-seeing and tourist exploring, meets new people who are silent, and obsesses about Harry subtextually. No, I'm serious. A Draco/Harry production.


Parchment and Rice Paper  
By: ShinigamiForever  
  
Warnings: SLASH.   
  
Disclaimer: I am JK Rowling. Muwhahahahahaha. Not really, but I wish I was. Ah, all the things I could do with HP then.  
  
Summary: In which Draco escapes to China, does a bit of sight-seeing and tourist exploring, meets new people who are silent, and obsesses about Harry subtextually. No, I'm serious. A Draco/Harry production.  
  
A/N: So this is basically me feeling really stupid. This fic was really quite annoying; I had the ending worked out, but the beginning and middle didn't want to work with me at all. Stupid random endings. Wai! I don't know why I even bother writing when there's so many good authors out there already, rhoddlet for one, bec is another, another rowan is also a really great author. But anyway, here I am plowing away at this. Everyone go read rhoddlet. I demand you read her. She (I think it's a she?) is definitely more worth your time.  
  
Note on the location: I needed someplace faraway. I've only been to China. Forgive me.  
  
===  
  
You like to pretend you're some kind of modern explorer sent to re-examine the world in various shades of truth and fiction, especially the countries that are wild and exotic and different, still different, even though Muggle electricty and the goddamn Internet (you will personally murder anyone who attempts to contact you with e-mail) have made the world smaller than it should be, scrunched up and pressed flat in someone's collection.  
  
Truth is, you're horribly out of place here, with your white skin and white hair and white face and pale pale gray eyes, you with your white-tinted shirts and khakis and pale pale clothing. In a crowd mostly made of black hair and orange highlighted heads, you jump right out, and it's not really a bad thing, since you feel out of place and the hotel clerks usually treat the foreigners better. It doesn't help that you don't know a word of Chinese, it all sounds like insane babbling to you, even though you can pick out words that maybe are supposed to be English. Speaking of which, and you still have a faint British accent, and some people can't understand what you say even when you speak English. Idiots, you think, they have such heavy Chinese accents you don't know whether to shove a translating spell down their throats or to smile and nod politely. After all, it's no worse than any attempt you could make trying Chinese. God forbid.  
  
When you were still a kid and not old enough for your father to point out horrible things to do with Muggles, you used to crawl up with a good book and read about faraway places: the ritual frozen politeness of Japan, the loosely warmth and spice of India, the sun-baked sands of Egypt, the carefree lazy perfection of Greece, and of course-  
  
America.  
  
The word all Slytherins whispered like starved peasants, the word dying on their lips in hopeful anguish. America.  
  
But you were here to get away from America, to be somewhere where the people were differently and the culture was so very different and the language was altered and where the chances of him running into a young man with dark brown bordering on black hair and leaf green eyes were very very small.   
  
The point was, you never really thought about going anywhere, and now that you have, you're really glad you did, because no book can ever make life jump out in such a frenzy like traveling can. You still remember the first time you entered an airport and had your breath taken away by the sheer number of the people, crowding up against each other, luggage banging into others, kids tearing through the place like headless chickens. No wonder Muggles couldn't do anything right, they were too disorganized. But the people still took your breath away, swept you right over. The flight attendant looked at you pretty funny when you got up to the counter. You've never flown on a plane before, although you figured it would be like flying on a broom, but once you got on the plane and it took off, you realized it was nothing like flying on a broom. You weren't in control, the movements made you dizzy and naeseous, and if it weren't for the fact that you had self control, you probably would have thrown up your breakfast and lunch just like the guy behind you did.   
  
For the most part, you like China, it's big and spacious but packed like Hogwarts was, full of streaming crowds and noise and vitality. You like the smells on markets, roasted meat and dumplings and sometimes noodles. There's something about strange foods that attract you, pull you towards them, because you like new things, the taste of burnt duck or unidentifiable seafoods on your tongue as you walk. You also like the casualness of the Chinese, dropping greetings in the streets, the men and women both so free, so content with their lives. They had no self-consciousness. The women weren't afraid of going to the market in their pajamas, just getting out of bed and heading out the door. You, surprisingly, would have been terrified.  
  
That was the main difference between you and the rest of the world.  
  
It was actually during this trip when you befriended someone in your travel group and started talking. He was about your age, tall, a gawky stature like he never quite matured into his body, a quick thinker, a good English speaker. He had said to you (you think it was someplace in Beijing, maybe), "You foreigners are all too serious. Too clamped up. Like an oyster. Open up. There might be a pearl there." And then smiled, and then bought you a popsicle. A popsicle! Like you were a little boy! But it was a green bean popsicle, and sweet and cold with the barest traces of mint, and you laughed like you hadn't for a long time.  
  
For the longest time, you thought someone had stolen your laugh.  
  
He calls you Draco, and you don't really need to know his name. He says your name kind of sounds like the Chinese words for chasing and entrance: zhuai-ko, or something like that. It's really rather ironic, you are looking for the entrance out of here. Out of your past, although that sounds awfully cliche.  
  
You shift a little on your seat, a stone seat as cold as the popsicle had been that day, even though it's warm and balmy today and sweat is beading around your forehead. You've been here for half the day, sitting next to the lake in the little mini-pagoda. There are little temples or stone architecture pieces built in the lake, protruding from the sea of lotuses otherwise occupying the water. The wind blows by this sticky scent that you assume comes from the flowers, you can't tell. There's a little bit of eucalpytus in it too, although you think that's from the green oil your friend had you rub on your face to prevent mosquito bites. The smells mixe under your nose, and you wrinkle it, the aroma almost sharp and itchy.  
  
The cicadas are buzzing in the nearby trees, and you can't tell where that sounds stops and the wind begins. The heat also seems to have a sound of its own, not hissing, but steaming nicely from the ground and stone floor of the pagoda, a rich clay smell from the rained on earth. The lake also smells of water and there's the gentle lapping that murmurs against the shore. It's calm and soothing, if you close your eyes, you could probably fall asleep.  
  
Maybe that's what you should do, fall asleep.   
  
Except falling asleep will make you dream about green and black and about rough ice cream skin, skin that belongs to him and the darker almost brown tapped skin under you, and about a voice silently shouting your name, and you don't want to embarrass yourself by crying when you wake up, especially if other people are watching you. And your little friend is, watching you with the patience of a stone idol; or maybe he's watching the lake, you can't tell, but you can feel eyes, and you don't particularily like eyes. Not particularily. You have a pair of emerald and bottle green eyes that you fantasize about, but while you really like his mocha coffee brown ones, the idea of those dark eyes watching you made you a little uneasy.  
  
You move again, shifting your hands so that one of them rests over your raised knee. The wind does a little dance on your hair, fingering with paper thin touch, then drifting by. There's something about that touch that makes you smile and think of a phrase, noli mae tangeri, touch me not. Something wistful and strange in that wind, as if it had a sad romance to tell. Stop being a romantic sap, Draco, you tell yourself, eyes involuntarily closing to enjoy the wind over your skin. It's just wind. It has nothing to say.  
  
And yet, it whispers against you, and draws your attention to the lake, with its bobbing surface and pink and green dotted canvas. The low afternoon sun and the cicadas overwhelming everywhere, your skin prickling where the pair of dark eyes were boring holes into the back of your neck. If you listen close enough, there's also a low murmuring of talking from some old people somewhere, small uncomprehendable sounds. You like the vague noises.   
  
It's been at least three months since you've been here, and about time for you to go back to your ridiculously repetitive life back in the wizarding world, but you hate having to go back and face the situation, yes, you're a coward, you admit that. It's why you're here in the first place with the ocean between you and him, with the ocean between wanting to do things you'll regret later. And there is something so beautiful about this illict escape that is unexplanable, something vague like the conversation behind you, and something you must learn about this escape that you haven't quite grabbed yet.  
  
You figure you have at least the rest of this month to chase after the meaning of life and love.  
  
You look out over the lake, its plant and flower surface swaying lazily in the wind, and you think of the dark eyes behind you, of the forever unfinished lesson you must learn, of noli mae tangeri, of rice paper and black ink, and of him.   
  
You don't even try to think about why all of these are related.  
  
  
  
  
  
A/N: Ahmm.... not my best, I think. Ah well. I really liked the ending, which was why I wrote this. Random pleas: I need a beta reader! Not really a beta reader, exactly, but at least someone who will be willing to just read junk for a first impression when I need one. That's about it.   
  
Leave a review. I'm begging for it, I really am. 


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